I think it will be interesting to see if this or a modified version makes it into some of the HPC clusters just as the Cell did in the past. It seems like it would have a high flops/watt ratio since it has to be low enough power to make it into a console.

Those numbers pretty much demand single precision FLOPS. 1.84 SP TFLOPS is *fine*, but it's only on par with a slightly overclocked 7850. Compared to a GK110 Tesla or Xeon Phi, it's already outclassed.

To put that in perspective, the top-end nVidia compute GPU is the Tesla K20x. It does almost 4 TFLOPS of single precision and 1.31 at double precision. (The GK104 is limited to DP at 1/24 the speed of SP, so they do make a dual GK104 product that does 4.5 TFLOPS at SP, but the DP is atrocious-- it's really only useful for some signal processing type duties. It's pretty efficient in terms of performance/watt and the Xeon Phi isn't too shabby either.

That's not to say that it's bad for an "integrated" GPU-- it's not. It's just not anything magically "special" either. Again, I suspect the DP performance to be mediocre, which is bad for HPC but fine for gaming.

Assuming this is an implementation of GCN architecture, which it almost certainly is (it's probably a version of Pitcairn) then it'll be running at 900-1000 MHz and its DP is 1/16th that of its SP. If it's based on Tahiti, then its DP is 1/4 of its SP - but would only be clocked around 500-600 MHz to achieve 1.84 TFLOPS SP.

Pitcairn DP: 115 GFLOPSTahiti DP: 460 GFLOPS

None of these are especially impressive, though the price could be right.

Assuming this is an implementation of GCN architecture, which it almost certainly is (it's probably a version of Pitcairn) then it'll be running at 900-1000 MHz and its DP is 1/16th that of its SP. If it's based on Tahiti, then its DP is 1/4 of its SP - but would only be clocked around 500-600 MHz to achieve 1.84 TFLOPS SP.

Pitcairn DP: 115 GFLOPSTahiti DP: 460 GFLOPS

None of these are especially impressive, though the price could be right.

I was hoping it was closer to the Tahiti number. An AMD blog said it is next generation graphics. Does that shed any light on which one it is. If it is Tahiti level that would put it at the top of the flops per Watt race and the unified memory model would make it easier to program tan the hybrid CPU accelerator systems.

If it's Tahiti with the numbers claimed, then the GPU alone has a TDP in excess of 150 watts on 28nm as well as over four billion features. Add four Jaguar units to that (each Jaguar is dual core, but it's trivial to just add more of them to get eight cores) and we're looking at five billion transistors and around 200W TDP. That's really pushing it for a console and the benefits over Pitcairn are up to double the SP compute power and double the memory bandwidth.

The figures we have at hand for SP compute power and memory bandwidth are very much Pitcairn figures. Assuming Pitcairn and the figures Sony has already shared, we have a much more reasonable 125 W TDP for the CPU(s) + GPU. The lowest Tahiti is a 3 TFLOP, 150 watt monster with nearly 300 GB/s bandwidth. Doesn't sound like anything Sony's announced to me.

Given that PS4 will have eight Jaguar cores for DP stuff, something CPUs are good at, there's no need at all to throw power, features and expense for something the PS4 will never use.